Narcissistic Personality Disorder

I recently had to break off a friendship with somebody who was to all intents and purposes, driving me crazy. I knew there was something wrong with him, but I didn't have all the pieces until one day I happened upon this website,

http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html#npd

In it, it discusses the effects and symptoms of a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD for short. Do click onto it and read it, because its absolutely fascinating, and heartbreaking as well. There are 9 essential symptoms that delineate the pathology of this illness, and if you or someone you know has them, you might do well to seek help.

They are.....

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
Translation: Grandiosity is the hallmark of narcissism. So what is grandiose?

The simplest everyday way that narcissists show their exaggerated sense of self-importance is by talking about family, work, life in general as if there is nobody else in the picture. Whatever they may be doing, in their own view, they are the star, and they give the impression that they are bearing heroic responsibility for their family or department or company, that they have to take care of everything because their spouses or co-workers are undependable, uncooperative, or otherwise unfit. They ignore or denigrate the abilities and contributions of others and complain that they receive no help at all; they may inspire your sympathy or admiration for their stoicism in the face of hardship or unstinting self-sacrifice for the good of (undeserving) others. But this everyday grandiosity is an aspect of narcissism that you may never catch on to unless you visit the narcissist's home or workplace and see for yourself that others are involved and are pulling their share of the load and, more often than not, are also pulling the narcissist's share as well. An example is the older woman who told me with a sigh that she knew she hadn't been a perfect mother but she just never had any help at all -- and she said this despite knowing that I knew that she had worn out and discarded two devoted husbands and had lived in her parents' pocket (and pocketbook) as long as they lived, quickly blowing her substantial inheritance on flaky business schemes. Another example is claiming unusual benefits or spectacular results from ordinary effort and investment, giving the impression that somehow the narcissist's time and money are worth more than other people's. [Here is an article about recognizing and coping with narcissism in the workplace; it is rather heavy on management jargon and psychobabble, but worth reading. "The Impact of Narcissism on Leadership and Sustainability" by Bruce Gregory, Ph.D. "When the narcissistic defense is operating in an interpersonal or group setting, the grandiose part does not show its face in public. In public it presents a front of patience, congeniality, and confident reasonableness."]
In popular usage, the terms narcissism, narcissist, and narcissistic denote absurd vanity and are applied to people whose ambitions and aspirations are much grander than their evident talents. Sometimes these terms are applied to people who are simply full of themselves -- even when their real achievements are spectacular. Outstanding performers are not always modest, but they aren't grandiose if their self-assessments are realistic; e.g., Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, was notorious for boasting "I am the greatest!" and also pointing out that he was the prettiest, but he was the greatest and the prettiest for a number of years, so his self-assessments weren't grandiose. Some narcissists are flamboyantly boastful and self-aggrandizing, but many are inconspicuous in public, saving their conceit and autocratic opinions for their nearest and dearest. Common conspicuous grandiose behaviors include expecting special treatment or admiration on the basis of claiming (a) to know important, powerful or famous people or (b) to be extraordinarily intelligent or talented. As a real-life example, I used to have a neighbor who told his wife that he was the youngest person since Sir Isaac Newton to take a doctorate at Oxford. The neighbor gave no evidence of a world-class education, so I looked up Newton and found out that Newton had completed his baccalaureate at the age of twenty-two (like most people) and spent his entire academic career at Cambridge. The grandiose claims of narcissists are superficially plausible fabrications, readily punctured by a little critical consideration. The test is performance: do they deliver the goods? (There's also the special situation of a genius who's also strongly narcissistic, as perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright. Just remind yourself that the odds are that you'll meet at least 1000 narcissists for every genius you come across.) [More on grandiosity.]

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Translation: Narcissists cultivate solipsistic or "autistic" fantasies, which is to say that they live in their own little worlds (and react with affront when reality dares to intrude).

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
Translation: Narcissists think that everyone who is not special and superior is worthless. By definition, normal, ordinary, and average aren't special and superior, and so, to narcissists, they are worthless.

4. Requires excessive admiration
Translation: Excessive in two ways: they want praise, compliments, deference, and expressions of envy all the time, and they want to be told that everything they do is better than what others can do. Sincerity is not an issue here; all that matter are frequency and volume.

5. Has a sense of entitlement
Translation: They expect automatic compliance with their wishes or especially favorable treatment, such as thinking that they should always be able to go first and that other people should stop whatever they're doing to do what the narcissists want, and may react with hurt or rage when these expectations are frustrated.

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends
Translation: Narcissists use other people to get what they want without caring about the cost to the other people.

7. Lacks empathy
Translation: They are unwilling to recognize or sympathize with other people's feelings and needs. They "tune out" when other people want to talk about their own problems. In clinical terms, empathy is the ability to recognize and interpret other people's emotions. Lack of empathy may take two different directions: (a) accurate interpretation of others' emotions with no concern for others' distress, which is characteristic of psychopaths; and (b) the inability to recognize and accurately interpret other people's emotions, which is the NPD style. This second form of defective empathy may (rarely) go so far as alexithymia, or no words for emotions, and is found with psychosomatic illnesses, i.e., medical conditions in which emotion is experienced somatically rather than psychically. People with personality disorders don't have the normal body-ego identification and regard their bodies only instrumentally, i.e., as tools to use to get what they want, or, in bad states, as torture chambers that inflict on them meaningless suffering. Self-described narcissists who've written to me say that they are aware that their feelings are different from other people's, mostly that they feel less, both in strength and variety (and which the narcissists interpret as evidence of their own superiority); some narcissists report "numbness" and the inability to perceive meaning in other people's emotions.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him
Translation: No translation needed.

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes
Translation: They treat other people like dirt.

Thought du Jour....

"If at first you don't succeed... So much for skydiving."

- H. Youngman

Long Haired Hippie Freaks!

Its lovely knowing artists. I mean, great artists. Painter-types, of the Caravaggio-is-a-god-old Masters-rawk school of art. James Huctwith is such a painter. He also photographs, (go figure) and has kindly provided the masses with this more up to date photograph of me, which is one of the few taken of me by anybody that I didn't immediately retch at the sight of. Dear James; he's almost made me look cute!

Bless his dear wee stone architectonic heart.

Mwah!

Notes from the Fey Underground....

I was getting frustrated. I was reading another article on the bloody backwards minded Prime Minister trying to open the gay marriage debate again, and I saw red. Because what it all came down to was plain old, in-yer-face redneck homophobia. In this day and age no less. I could just spit. After the provincial courts basically said, "Uh, excuse me? Has anyone noticed this form of discrimination is against the Charter?", did anyone deign to do anything about it. It was agreed through almost all of the provinces (we won't mention you Alberta and your slavish devotion to the term "notwithstanding") that the marriage laws were unconstitutional and simply unfair, legal or not, and that society had matured and progressed enough to change an unfair law and outdated tenet. The country and the parliament spoke quite plainly and said O.K. and agreed that it should pass. THEN after all that, this backwards thinking reactionary PINHEAD isn't a year into office with a MINORITY gov't, and is trying to push us back into the stone-age, spending OUR money to satisfy his own homophobic prejudices. Whatever happened to Trudeau's famous, "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation?" I thought we were a so-called JUST society, a PROGRESSIVE society.

I sat there, inwardly steaming, and thought about how long and how hard I had to struggle inwardly to be proud of who I was, of how many years it took before I could just be offhand and unconcerned about telling people I was gay. Now, I open a newspaper only to see how this toadying ignoramus is trying to basically designate a large portion of the people he was elected to serve as second class citizens. And I ask myself, "How is this possible?" Does this moron and his confederacy of dunces know NOTHING?

Nobody chooses to be a homosexual, anymore than anybody chooses to be straight. Nobody sits down at adolescence or in the middle of a twenty year marriage and says, “Hmmm. There’s not enough angst in my life right now, let’s see, what can I do to really up the ante on the old grief sweepstakes? I know! I'll be gay!!!” Nobody without a decidedly advanced masochistic streak decides to deliberately entertain risking mass alienation, discrimination, ridicule, and violence if they can help it.

Being gay isn’t a choice. The only choice you can make about it is to tell the truth about it and accept it and dare to be happy and honest about yourself, or lie about it and have the lie ruin your life. You can’t turn it off and on like a switch. If you could, straight people could do it too. Of course, the joke is when you ask them if they can be gay, (the homophobic types that is) they look at you as if you’re mad. “Of course not!” they snap. So why do they assume anyone else can be straight on demand? Nobody can help who they're attracted to. You either are, or you're not. Its ingrained in you, like being left handed, or the colour of your skin, and your eyes. Sexuality develops with you, and as we know, that takes years. Your voice changes, you grow breasts, you start to shave, you think about sex. Same as everybody else. The only difference is, the object of your affection isn’t the girl next door, it’s the boy you play soccer with. Or the girl you play soccer with. It might happen at thirteen, or it might awaken at forty, depending on how self-accepting and self-aware you are.

As we know, homosexuality has existed since time immemorial. Its pointless to note that some of the greatest thinkers, inventors, geniuses, artists, rulers of all time have been gay. From Alexander the Great and his General Hephaesteon to Virginia Woolf to Davinci to Aristotle to Byron, Walt Whitman, Greta Garbo, kd lang all the way to my mother’s hairdressers Nory and Victor, homos are and have been everywhere, in every strata of society. It would be marvellous if we knew when the first instance of homosexuality occurred, but unfortunately, we don’t have the first recorded instance of when cro-magnon man Groog decided he really had the hots for his buddy Tonk, and not the sultry, bucktoothed, slope headed charms of the girl next door, Dag. But we can, with some assurance be fairly certain that, like the discovery of fire, it happened.

As my grandfather (a Baptist farmer who went to Church every Sunday, and who never smoked, drank or swore) said on the subject, “God created all sorts of flowers. Why should people be any different?”

Being gay (and my apologies to all of the lesbians and transgendered folk I'm leaving out by calling it that, but for brevity's sake, I'll just stick with that term as its quicker and I like it. I figured if you’re going to be called something most people already think is an aberration, you might just as well give it a happy sounding name) in a perfect world, would be something that is taken just as for granted as being left handed is. It would have been something that was just accepted, and not ruminated over torturously for hours on end. As Virginia Woolf in David Hare's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's wonderful THE HOURS, said on her struggle with madness, “ I wrestle alone in the dark, and only I can know, only I can understand my own condition”, coming to accept one’s sexuality at any age is a solitary and lonely experience. For a gay kid, it can be the most isolating and traumatizing experience of their young lives.

Take a look at the odds stacked against you for one thing; society has already condemned you for the most part, and if you were like me, growing up in a small town, the fact that one preferred reading to hockey, movies to baseball, and was not a loud boisterous rowdy kid already earmarked you as odd. Being gay just got you beat up, or worse. You hid it as best you could, or denied it to yourself, praying you’d wake up and be normal one day, or put it on the back burner of your psyche until you could deal with it one day. Many come through it and are the wiser for it. Many young people are not so lucky. Many young people are rejected, thrown out on the street, scorned and ostracized from their family and friends. Some are even killed, either often by their own hand, or by others. Many don’t survive that struggle. Many kill themselves because they imagine it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. They’ve been told that homosexuality is a sickness, a sin, and that they’re evil, depraved and are going to hell. Imagine subjecting a bright young mind to that kind of mental torture, all because they simply love differently. How could anyone calling themselves humane put any youngster through that kind of agony? These kids are told, and are led to believe, that it’s a crime for them to love at all.

You've heard of Jacob wrestling the dark angel at Peniel? "I will not let thee go til thou bless me, but then I will let thee go." Many youngsters think of their homosexuality like that, a struggle, or a condition, an illness, a flaw. Many never achieve the heights they’re capable of in their youth because they’re too busy tearing themselves up inside, wondering whether or not they’re sick, and if they should kill themselves.

I’ve always been gay, even before I knew what it was, or what sex was, it was always there. And what’s more, everyone who knew me, knew as well, oftimes, long before I acknowledged it to myself. In my case I’ve been enormously lucky to have been supported by a remarkable pair of parents who believed in me and never gave up on me when I was close to giving up on myself. I had a grandfather who believed in the example of Christ, that if one lives a truly unselfish life, one cannot be unhappy. I had an uncle who died too young, who let me know in no uncertain terms that gay or not, I was his nephew and he loved me as much as he did his own children. And best of all, I had a younger brother who is and always has been my rock. Mind you, he’s never been above teasing me about being gay, but then I’ve never minded teasing him about his hairline either.

When I came out to my straight, church going, motorcycle riding lady-killer of a brother at age 28 (never, by the way, do that when somebody is pulling out of a Dunkin’Donuts onto a busy on-ramp, they tend to be concentrating on their driving) he merely rolled his eyes, shook his head, and looked at me pityingly.
“PLEASE don’t tell me you’re only figuring this out now.” He said with the most scornful voice I’d ever heard him use.
“Whaddaymean?” I snapped.
“Trev,” He said, with the slow, patient voice generally used with the mentally defective, “EVERYBODY knows! Mom, Dad, everybody. Its not like it’s a big shock, you know.” “Whaddaymean everybody knows?” I yelled.
“Dude. Think about it. We’re seven and six. Its Halloween. I’m going out as Spiderman and you’re going out as Batman. At the last minute, you decide you want to go out as Wonder Woman, and you think we’re not gonna have a CLUE? How dumb do you think we are?”

Point taken.

I’ve been supported and held aloft by remarkable family and friends all of my life. I’ve been lucky. Coming out for me was largely a cause for celebration, since even more than I did at the time, all of these wonderful people simply wanted me to be happy. When I told them that my accepting the fact that I was gay was what would make me happy, they rejoiced. To them, my sexuality did not define WHO I was, it was simply a part of who I was. What I was and am to them is unique. What I am is a talented, sensitive, funny human being. The same as you are, the same as we all have the potential to be. THAT is what we should be concerned with, not with what makes us different and divides us, but what makes us alike and draws us together. I was taught and surrounded by that kind of philosophy all of my life, and so yes, I was lucky. But I was brutally aware that as lucky as I was, there were so many others who weren't nearly so fortunate.

I've had friends who've been thrown out of the house, who've lived on the streets as teenagers, who've been beaten up and had all sorts of awful things happen to them simply because their so-called loved ones let their own homophobia and hatred destroy their relationship with their child. One wonders how a rational person could let that happen. Well, it happens. Frequently. Otherwise, how can you explain a prime minister like the one we have in office? He wants to destroy a relationship with a large portion of the populace he has sworn to serve.

Nobody knows why homosexuality exists, we only know that it does. Why it does is largely irrelevant. One might as well ask why some people are left handed, and why some have red hair, or black skin. It might make for interesting scientific analysis to some day discover that there is a very specific biological reasoning for this physical and genetic diversity, that the continued survival and evolution of the human species and its society depends on it, but it is largely irrelevant really. It is here, it has always been here, and always will be here. To protest against its existence just isn’t logical. One might just as well protest against the existence of salt water. It’s a waste of energy and time.

As I recall, it was seen as a social crime (not too long ago around here) for a Protestant to marry a Catholic, or to marry inter-racially. In California, there was a law right up until the late 1940’s about miscegenation onscreen, that is, you couldn’t have a love scene onscreen between two people of different races. No kissing. The Civil Rights movement was only forty years ago, and Stonewall and the Women's Movement of the 70's happened even later than that. We like to think of Canada as a civilized society, a leader in progressing humanity forward. Yet, we still give serious consideration to the phobias and fears that hold us back as a progressive society, otherwise why would anyone give serious consideration to re-opening the marriage debates? We give in to those prejudices. We’ve made strides in gender and racial and religious inequalities and phobias (not that any of them are close to being perfect and/or fixed) so why is homosexuality the last great taboo?

Some might say it has everything to do with the emasculation of the male ego. The theory there is that some straight men have such a violent reaction to homosexuality because it denotes effeminacy, weakness, an emasculation, and because sexuality for the male is about penetration, therefore the whole homophobic issue becomes about the obsession with gay male sex.

The fear of lesbianism would therefore be logically tied in with the rejection of the male notion of sexuality, since, in effect, the male has been rendered obsolete and unwanted by the female taking control of her own sexuality. Again the issue becomes about the domination of and rejection of the male ego. And men to put it bluntly, are all about the ego. Reject that, and you’ve made them very angry, very angry indeed. Men will go to war over their egos. Hell, they’ve probably gone to war over penis size, but the history books don’t tell you that. So if that’s what this huge debate is about, and this fear of homosexuality is largely based on the straight male’s phobias about his potency and loss of masculinity through the perception of being feminine or submissive or passive, or penetrated or rejected, then perhaps we can begin to understand how to effectively fix these misapprehensions by the way we raise our sons. After all, children are taught to hate, they're not born doing it like say, breathing.

Another theory some have, is that perhaps homosexuality is there as a sign from God. Perhaps it is one of the last true meanings of the story of the Tower of Babel. Perhaps, if there is an Almighty God, he did not intend to make the road to heaven an easy one to get to. Perhaps it was meant to be earned. That in order to truly learn to love our fellow human beings, we had to get past our prejudices and phobias about what they looked like and how they sounded, and what they believed, and who they slept with, to discover their inner light, just as we hoped they would discover ours. Perhaps only then, could we truly be joined as a common humanity, and take our place with the angels.

But that’s just a guess.

I think I’d like to end this with part of a letter from the heart, from a mother. I’ve given irreverent and earnest reasons why homophobia needs to be done away with, but I think its time we hear why we seriously, morally and for the sake of all our children, cannot allow this cancer to fester on society any longer, or have it destroy any more innocent lives. Her name is Sharon Underwood, and this is part of a letter she wrote her daily newspaper in response to a homophobic letter to the editor…I found this letter ironically, on a dance album called UTOPIA, and I credit the producers for having included it in the liner notes....

“My first born son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay, or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called fag incessantly, starting when he was six. In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17 year old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity. You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth for you to abuse. You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people around the world who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin. The deep thinking author of a letter who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks, “Whatever happened to the idea of striving…to be better human beings than we are?”

Indeed sir, whatever happened to that?”

Holiday Kvetches....

No, not the Christmas/Passover/Lent/Easter/Groundhog Day kind of holidays. The "I'm taking a week off for no reason other than the fact that I'm sick of all of your faces" kind of holiday. No, not really, as I actually quite like the people I work with, a lot. There's really not a bad apple in the bunch. Oh, they have cranky days like everybody, but honestly, I think I've got them all beat there. When I'm cranky, its just BAAAAAAD.

No, I just needed a week to try and unwind (it hasn't happened yet, I'm still tense and its Thursday....) so that when I get assaulted by the overwhelming workload when I get back, I won't lose my mind in anxiety attacks, which is what I was having a few weeks before. A sure sign that I needed a break. The problem is I'm not sure what I should do. This evening, I'm going to clean my apartment from top to bottom, do a laundry and exhaust myself in the process. Tomorrow morning, I'm up early to do some writing and then I'm going for a bike ride to practice for Saturday and tomorrow afternoon, I've got my professional organizer friend coming in to help me purge junk out of my apartment. Tomorrow night I have a concert at the Opera House to go to.

Why then, do I feel so desperate? I haven't done any writing, shame on me, and I'm kvetching about nothing really. I keep thinking of people who REALLY have problems, what with brain tumours, AIDS, abusive spouses and the whatnot flying about and I think to myself, "You putz, quit whining and do something." So for now, until I work up my nerve to sort through my laundry, I'm doing this.

Thank God for this bike rally. Its actually given me a focus on something else besides my own neuroses. Its true that old saying, that if you want to forget about yourself keep yourself busy doing stuff for others. A pity I'm so damn selfish and don't do more of it. James H. and I were speaking of this the other day, that if you're creative by nature (I don't deign to call myself an artist, but James is undoubtedly) then solitude to do your work is a necessity. The problem is, I always feel guilty if I take that time for myself, when I think there are other, more pressing things to be doing. Selfishness, and a certain sort of ruthlessness is necessary I think in order to be successful in any art. That and a very strong sense of self-discipline. None of which I've got. I can be selfish, but its a reactionary selfishness that hits when I feel burnt out, and I usually end up being my own worst enemy as a result ("I'm going to stay out and drink all night because I've had a shitty week!") and I end up paying for it for days afterwards. I've too much of a weak stomach to be really ruthless with anybody, and I have no self-discipline. I get things finished eventually, but its the going back and redoing, and rewriting and the rest of it that finishes me off.

One hears about mentors and such and so forth that kick their students' asses and keep them working endlessly on their art and improving, and I think that's what I'd like. A kickass impresario who nags me endlessly for more copy, and then sends it back and says, more, more, more!! But the truth is; that's what I'd like. Its probably not what I need. What I need is to take responsibility for this beast myself and attack it daily. And that's what I'm going to do.

Tomorrow.

Mirror Mirror

This would be my goddaughter, Tiegan Nicholls, drooly-monster, crawly-bug and chatterbox extraordinnaire. She's in Holland with her folks, so we don't chat often. We did on Sunday however, and she had a great deal to say, and if I'd had an ounce more sense, I probably would have grasped it.

Here, she's admiring her visage in front of the stove. Handy for checking out the do', when you're crawling about on all fours. According to her parentals, Jen and Rohan, she's hyper-feisty and incredibly active and alert. Thank heavens. When I'm ninety and this kid's pushing my wheelchair during visits to the home, I don't want her falling asleep at the wheel!

Hopefully it won't be long before she's saying more than outraged shrieks and giggles, although admittedly these do work wonders for getting the point across. At any rate, we'll be getting updates regularly to see how the wee moppet is doing.....

Amazonomania, or How Wonder Woman Changed My Life (When I Was Six)

Pictures courtesy of ABC TV and DC Comics and Jim Krolz

Oh, its alright, go ahead and laugh. Everyone does now who knew of my obsession then. When that theme music started and the trumpets and disco music began to blare and that cartoon image came onscreen, you couldn't have torn me away from that TV with plyers and a tractor chain. To this day my brother STILL teases me about it and my parents just roll their eyes to heaven and change the topic to the rising cost of soybeans. For years I was embarrassed about my all too apparent obsession with HER, or as I liked to call her in code, WW, because I was too embarrassed to actually utter her name whenever I announced that I was going to watch her on television. Years later I didn't even acknowledge that I knew anything about the character, much less that I had spent the first ten formative years of my life slavishly devoted to her. Yes my dears, you've grasped it at last, the long dormant secret is out; my pre-adolescent 7 year old soul was obsessed with a near religious intensity with all things Wonder Woman.

I remember the first comic book of hers I ever bought. We were living in my grandfather's house in King City, so I couldn't have been more than seven. ( It was actually Wonder Woman Vol.34, No.220, October-November 1975. See below. I actually found it, can you belIEVE it? Hee! Ain't the net fab?!?) So yah, I would have been seven. It was odd, I remember looking at the picture on the front years later, and thinking of how much the bust they drew of WW (that's the head you know!) looked a heckuva lot like Jane Russell. But I digress....

It was all part of a progression, as I recall. I remember as a really little kid of around three or four, I tended to become obsessed with, or have crushes on, dark haired women. (To this day, I don't know why. It wasn't a Freudian Oedipal thing, as my own mother's hair was auburn and in the summer the sun would streak it blonde.) It started with Disney's Snow White, and I guess the next logical step was Wonder Woman, and then it segued into LIVE women, such as the actress playing Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter herself, and then other actresses like Vivien Leigh and Audrey Hepburn as I got older. There was never a sexual allure about these women for me, although they were all staggeringly beautiful. It was more of an extreme identification in some way, although I'm not sure I could formulate a theory as to what that identification might have been. I do remember thinking, even as a youngster, that women were inherently more graceful than men, and moved better. They weren't large and bulky and boxlike. Perhaps it was the feline quality inherent in certain women I subconsciously admired. Whatever it was, the idea of a beautiful young woman with tremendous physical power was incredibly appealing. I could never relate to the muscle bound behemoths of Superman, or Batman, much less the Hulk (although my brother ironically was as obsessed with the Green Goliath as I was with the Amazon princess...did I mention he's straight?) as I simply didn't look like that, and despairingly never would. To my pre-adolescent brain, a slim and fragile looking young woman lifting a car, or leaping three stories into the air seemed to have more in common with me than the Hulk did, that was for sure. I was small boned, and felt quite fragile and weak and funny looking to boot, and here was this sympathetic and beautiful woman bending steel bars with her bare hands. What wasn't to like?

Oh, I'm not saying Wonder Woman made me gay, don't be stupid. Just to prove my point, one afternoon when I was seven, I managed to talk my five year old brother and his friend Mark into being deputized as "co-Wonder Women" and we ran around our grandparents' backyards in makeshift Wonder Woman costumes, looking nothing so much like midget transgendered Amazons. As I recall our behaviour was mostly hollering and fighting about who got to play with the magic lasso, and who's turn it was to fly the invisible plane. Most un-Amazon like. My brother, who in all likelihood has blocked this little childhood excursion into his feminine side right out of his brain, grew up to be captain of his hockey team, a ladies man, and a happily married father of three in the suburbs. Mark fronts a rock'n roll band mostly in his underwear, singing about bed wetting and is apparently intent on reliving Robert Plant's imaginary life. I simply note all of this as proof positive that not all little boys who play with Amazons grow up to be gay. You have to do it right, or it just doesn't take.

If Wonder Woman didn't make me gay, then I think she was a fairly good indicator that I was going to be. My parents certainly thought so, and although I'm sure it gave them a great many sleepless nights, they bit their tongues. Occasionally however, out of desperation they suggested that I might want to dress up as Batman or Spiderman or some MALE superhero for a change as opposed to cutting out construction paper tiaras, bracelets and breastplates to match.

I collected the comics, I watched the series (violent fistfights ensued with my brother on Friday nights over whether we were watching Wonder Woman or Donny and Marie. I wanted to watch Wonder Woman naturally, and he was all for Donny Osmond in sequins. And he's the straight one. Go figure.) and when it went off the air, I was crushed, although to be truthful, I never really approved of her moving to California and trying to become a pop singer.

As time went on, I grew older and although my interest shifted away from our favourite Amazon, and I added new idols to my firmament of powerful divas; Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, etc., I never forgot my first excitement over the image of a raven haired beauty in an invisible plane, spinning her magic lasso. Occasionally too, I would pick up a comic to see how Diana was faring in Man's World. After all, a lot had changed since I was seven. Although immortal, Diana was thirty years older too.

Why did she still fascinate me, and admittedly still does, some thirty-one years after I first saw her battling Chronos outside the UN building? What is her enduring appeal for gay men? That she made such a powerful influence on a generation of women is old news. That she also was perhaps the first female iconic character of power for a generation of gay boys growing up in the shadow of the women's movement is a fact that is seemingly never remarked on. Like the Bionic Woman and so many other iconic female characters that were either in comics or on television, Wonder Woman had a near universal appeal to all sexes and ages. Phil Jimenez, the legendary artist and writer who redefined the Amazon princess in her latest incarnation said that, “My theory always remains that these women were both super strong and they were sex symbols to men. I think for a lot of young gay men, at least for me, what appealed to them was that they were super heroic – they did these heroic feats, they went to fantastic worlds, they fought these super villains. So that was appealing on one level. On the other level, they were also sexually desirable to men, which I think, when you’re young and you’re into men but you don’t know how or why, I think that’s a very appealing quality, because not only are you saving the world, but cute boys want you all along the way.”

But finally, I always thought Lynda Carter said it best when asked about the lasting allure of the iconic character she played for three years on television. She said Wonder Woman's appeal was ''the combination of a woman being a woman but also having a masculine side. She could be strong and beautiful like they [gay men] can be strong and beautiful. I think there's such a strong archetype there for gay people, that secret self. It's that hidden self that's not about being defined by secrets or by sexuality, but being defined by your heart. So many of us have to hide our lives in order to make other people comfortable. And when you stop hiding your life to make other people comfortable, you begin to love yourself.''

Phil Jimenez quotes from Superheroes and the feminine mystique
by Travis D. Bone, courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Times

Lynda Carter quotes from Wondrous Woman by Randy Schulman courtesy of the Metro Weekly

Clear as Mud; Or, Ahab Had It Easy, Further Adventures in the Writing Life

Photo courtesy of www.russianpoetry.net







Uggh. I tried reworking my play this morning. For those of you who have known me since forever began (or the last incident of glacial drift) you'll know of what white whale to which I am referring. My play/screenplay/novel, large allegorical balinoptera blanche, INTO CLEAR DARKNESS. The play, (if I may use my TV Guide version of it) is really two plays, one about a professor dying of AIDS who is working on his biography of the late great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. The second, smaller play within the play is the story of the poet's harsh and tragic life. The actors playing the characters in the professor's life also play the characters in Akhmatova's life. The professor and the poet are mirror images of the other. These are the stories of a man being removed from all he loves by illness, contrasted to the story of a woman who has everything and everyone she loves taken from her by war and the world around her. An internal and external examination of loss as it were, but not nearly so clinical.

Alright, maybe that's a little longer than TV Guide would have put it, but at least you know what's going on.

No, don't call me Ishmael, the name is definitely Ahab. I admit it, I've thrown so many pen-shaped harpoons into this thing that its starting to look like a terrorist attack at a Bic factory.

Let me see, I started writing this, oh dear God, it HAS to be about ten years ago at least by now. Its gone through several million drafts, and has had several readings, including one in NewYork City, staged by the ever versatile and lovely Marya Piffer DeVries. Its a long magnum opus that is in dire need of a dramaturg with a scythe. I try it intermittently, but after working so long on it, I lack perspective. Its one of those things where I know what I want to achieve, its just a struggle to get there. Its reception has been mixed. (George S. Kaufman was once asked what the term "mixed notices" meant when plays were reviewed. "It means good and lousey." said George.)

At the readings, some people adored the play, and some loathed it. I had one respected theatre friend tell me to just put it away in a drawer and forget about it and write something else. I have written other things, three other plays since then in fact, but this one, I just keep coming back to it. Its a maddening thought, because you're always left wondering; what if it's a good idea, but you just don't have the skills to bring it to fruition? What if it's a bad idea that just should never have been attempted? I've had so many people tell me so many different things, I'm quite hard pressed to know what to do with it, much less guess what form it should actually take. It started out as a play, but what if it's really a screenplay, or a novel? So you see, it's been a bit of a struggle. This week I've taken off in an attempt to deal with the beast. God knows how well I'll succeed. Que sera, sera, to quote Doris Day....

Now that I think about it, Ahab had it lucky. You can't very well MISS a white whale. They kinda stick out. This whale is shrouded in murk......

The LAST Birthday Schpiel, I PROMISE....

This is just a short one about my birthday party. Heee!! I know, I know, honest to God, all anybody's gonna think is that I'm on a perpetual round of self-congratulations over aging as well as a beach party movie! T'ain't true my dears! I'm just lucky enough to have very hedonistic friends who will grab any excuse to drag out a party! Stephanie Nickerson, hostess, cake baker and all around GEEEN-I-US Friend Extraordinnaire pulled out all the stops last night and threw me a basherooonie at her swankily swell new abode and almost all my nearest and dearest appeared! Even my MOM came! And my brother Todd managed to get parolled from suburban Dad duty and got his ass down there all the way from NEWMARKET!! Plus there was Alison and Ina and David and a whole messa folks I don't get to see very often were all there too! I was so touched to see so many of my touchstones all together in one room and best of all, they all looked to have a great time! James and Alison and Ina waxed rhapsodic on Cuba, my Mom adored the house and oohed and aahhhed over every little detail, I ate three slabs of cake (who knew I'd like Lemon Curd?) and everyone just seemed to have a good time, which is all you can really hope for at any party. Thank you to all who came and made my next-to last dying gasp of my thirties so memorable.....

On Short People

Nabbing a nefarious pickpocket at Christmas



I may have been mad. I don't know what I was thinking. It isn't that I didn't know any better, I did, but I keep thinking visits to my brother's house will end up being a sort of Somerset Maugham weekend in the country, where Helen Mirren will float amiably into view wearing a sari and a martini, delivering acid bon mots that will make the butler cry. That sort of respite. Who am I kidding? Its always weird when I go to visit my brother and his family in the burbs. They live in an area (formerly forest, formerly farmland, and now breadbox cookie cutter house after house) that makes Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands' suburban hell seem positively Elysian by comparison. They at least had hedges there. There is scant greenery in this bastion of boxery, and what is there, is hard put to decide whether its grass, astroturf or a CGI con job. All the streets are named after trees that have long been cut down, ie; Maple Grove Avenue, and you'd be lucky to find a maple tree in a five mile radius. THAT sorta thing. So there I was, miles away from the horns and sirens, psychos and streetweirdos I'd come to know and if not admire, at least recognize. Here all the psychos were bandbox approved, complacently small and lionized beyond belief. Suburban Ma's and Pa's and their offspring.

But what was I doing here? I had about as much in common with suburbia as I did with a Monster Truck Rally. I was an urban creature, I gave dinner parties, went to bars and went dancing with friends, and whiled away weekends discussing relationships, art, and life over tea and cookies, and then later on (after a shower and change of clothes) vodka and too much loud dance music. What was I doing here?

It was like being dropped in a Dali painting, only THAT I would have understood. Who'd have thought the ordinary could be so surreal? (To quote Madeline Kahn, "How owdinawy.") I sat there, bemused and a little bored. What do married people with children do for fun? Talk about their children's potty training sagas and Dora the Explorer by the sounds of it. Yuck. Nope. Won't do. They certainly don't do the stuff we errant city naifs do, by the look of it. Nowhere even close. I was the only single person there by the look of it, sitting on a bench between two dead cedar trees (they were there, singly and alone I might add, obviously a dire portent of fates to come unless I came to my senses, snagged some poor worm, shagged like mad and produced a wee sprog to throw into the gaiety of nations. Ye Gods...) without a child, and/or partner, mate or significant other. What could I tell them when they asked where all of the above was? That I didn't have any? That all of my significant others had commitment issues and were allergic to diapers, suburbia and places where they serve Apple Slurpees instead of Apple Martinis?

What indeed, COULD I tell them? It was like speaking another language.

Well, the obvious answer was that I was up here for my brother’s sake. Moral support as it were. I was up visiting for my sister in law’s birthday on the weekend, as my brother was planning a surprise party for her. Not being a planner by nature, (not that I am either) I knew he could use all of the support he could get. So there I was. Feeling awkward and looking odd for being so obviously solo. Despite my dread, the party went well, as far as BBQ parties in suburban backyards go. Enough food for a mob of marauding Gauls (which, considering most of the partiers were guests under six, wasn’t as far a stretch as at first might be believed) and no bloodshed.

Although if might be fair to say that at this point, my youngest nephew Christian did keep grabbing his toy lawn mower back from some little dude who just wanted to BORROW it, obviously, until finally I and his uncle John stepped in and persuaded him to let the little guy play with it, as it was nice to share, and this, after all, was a democracy, and besides it wasn’t as if he was going to steal it, he was still learning how to walk for Chrissakes. Christian ditched the hospitality angle and went for the cake we offered by recompense instead.

While standing around, admiring the dead foliage next to my bench, I looked around and I noticed something about the parents. At least, the parents my age. They hovered. I don’t ever remember my parents hovering. Not like this. Sure, they kept an eye on us, and warned us about the oncoming Mac truck that was bearing down the road on us where we were playing ball hockey, but they were wonderfully nonchalant about it. Not like this bunch. Here were three and four year olds being practically shadowed by a parent, like a basketball guard, arms out to ward off, what? An imminent attack by Baby Gap devouring condors? It was as if the kids were water balloons, and the parents were trying to keep them from breaking. I don’t ever remember my Mom acting like I would break anytime soon. I know she threatened to break me on a number of occasions, but that was just talk, and I chalked it up to stress. She was pretty lenient about my mobility. Not that I didn’t have my limitations. I mean, I do remember her nixing my wanting to go white water rafting when I was four or five while visiting in the Pocanos, with George and Winnie Henry’s sixteen year old daughter. “Mommy! I’ll have a LIFEJACKET on! AND my water wings!” I protested loudly, but she, being Baptist, was immoveable. (Dad was Catholic, and much more open to bargaining) I recall that as being the only time she actually put her foot down about my not endangering myself needlessly. Mostly it was, “Good luck, have fun, enjoy yourselves, and don’t come back dead. Or if you do, at least wait until my soap is over.”

I remember we were given what seemed like unlimited freedom as children, and had very little interference. She certainly never hovered. As for my Father, I actually had to go inside and drag him out from watching his golf game to get him anywhere near hovering. Maybe they trusted us more then, or thought we were smarter than we think our kids are. To watch this mob in my brother’s backyard, you would have thought their spawn were woven from icing sugar and match-sticks.

Maybe it’s a different day and age, but when children are in a sheltered backyard with a seven foot high wooden fence and thick grass lawn all the way around, I think it’s a little excessive to hang nervously over the little rugrats as though they’re made of fine Sevres porcelain. Call me reactionary, but I don’t think mollycoddling children does them any good. But then, I could be talking out of my ass. I’ve had plastic plants expire on me, just out of spite. What did I know? So I shrugged my shoulders, quit trying to figure out the impossible, and enjoyed myself watching my brother get drunk on two wine coolers.

At any rate, the next day I got up, thinking I’d be heading out soon, but my father (who was my ride) had a meeting nearby and would be back at noon, and so I was stuck for a few more hours. Hmmm. What do you do on a Sunday a.m. in suburbia? Answer; when you’re Uncle Trev, you spend Sunday morning with the oldest, Melissa, who’s six, and her youngest brother Christian, who’s two and a half. Their father, (my brother) had taken their middle brother out to a birthday party, and their Mom was cleaning up after the party, and I was delegated to watch the other two inmates. “Fine.” I thought to myself, staring warily at their beady little eyes as they slurped on their fifth freezy of the morning, “How hard can it be? They’re short. I can always outrun them.”

At one point, after breakfast, their Mom told them to go get changed out of their pyjamas as they wanted to go play outside. So, being the temporary warden, I was deputed to go change Christian into his clothes (Melissa knew what she wanted to wear and plunged on ahead into her room) for the day. Now, I know about as much about children’s wardrobe as I do about lunar landings, and so I head up with Christian by the hand to his room, and I stand there like an idiot, looking through dresser drawers (a sight nicer than my beat up old IKEA ones at home I can tell you), not knowing what the HELL I’m looking for. I pull out the smallest orange socks I’ve ever seen in my life, (Bob the Builder socks, can you believe it?) and then I find a cool yellow t-shirt with a big green lizard crawling out of the pocket, and I think, “that’s cool”.

I throw that on the bed, where Christian by the way, is sitting quietly, patience itself, wondering what the hell his undoubtedly mad uncle is mumbling and muttering about over the state of children’s wear in this day and age. In the midst of all the confusion, I think, pants. The dude can’t go about in his underwear, or diapers or whatever the hell they’re called, and so I reach into what looks like a pants drawer, and pull out the damndest thing. A pair of denim boxer shorts. I take a second quick look and I realize that on closer inspection, my God, they’re PANTS. “Kee-RIST!” I exclaim, “Are people REALLY this small?!?” I hear a laugh behind me, “KEE-WISTE!” Christian mimics my Bette Davis-ese perfectly. Ye Gods. His Baptist father will not be impressed. I bite my tongue and rapidly start mentally repeating, “Internal thought, internal thought!”

I take another look at the pants. Good enough. So I throw the pants on the bed and turn to the kid, “O.K. dude, let’s get you changed.” Whereupon, as if on cue, he falls flat on his back and sticks his feet straight up into the air as if he’s going to start juggling a ball with them. I just stare at him, completely nonplussed. What the hell does THAT mean? SHOULD I toss him a ball, just to see what he does? Just in time, his sister thankfully bounds into the room to explain.

“OH, that.” She says sagely, seeing his little bare feet pointing skyward, like a bizarre midget Martha Graham poseur. “He thinks you want to change his diaper.”

ACK!!! I shake my head with a definitive NO, and then I remember; external thought, external thought!

“No, no, no, no, NO. Uncle Trev doesn’t DO Waste Disposal management. Besides, your Mom changed him downstairs. No kid, we’re getting you dressed. CLOTHES. See?”

I hold up the yellow iguana t-shirt. He nods, sits up, and throws his arms up in the air. Now we’re getting somewhere.

I pull off his pyjama top and pull the t-shirt on over his head, but it appears to be stuck.

“Uncle Trevor, that’s the sleeve.” Melissa pipes up helpfully, as her brother emits these odd growls while trying to get his head unstuck from a hole built for an arm. And a small arm at that.

“Oh yes, right. Of course. Sorry kid.” We get the shirt on fine, and then the pants (elastic waist, thank GOD!) which we just pull up, and then the Bob the Builder socks (“Do we like Bob the Builder, Christian?” “YAH.” Man of few words, that one.) and he’s dressed. But I’m looking at him, and I’m thinking, “Hmmmm. Something’s missing. A SWEATER!”

Now its warm outside, or its going to be, and I don’t want him to fry or freeze either way, so I reach into another drawer and pull out (wait for it) a Bob the Builder sweater! (This bastard’s everywhere) I turn to Christian, and say, “Bob the Builder?” “YAH.” (Thank God. Consistency is everything when you’re two and a half.)
I take the sweater and in an inspired “the Gay Gene Finally Kicks In Moment” tie the arms around his neck making him look very Polo ad-ish, if Pixar animated characters were the impetus for overpriced yuppie clothing wear. I tie the sweater loosely with flourish, pronounce him as “Suave as hell”, and tell him to go show his Ma. He tears ass down the stairs at lightspeed, and when I catch up with him, he is standing there beaming in front of her and his sister as if on a fashion runway, to much “oohing and ahhhing” from the crowd. Mission accomplished. Or so I think.

Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting at the table, sipping my orange juice and reading a book of John Steinbeck’s letters, when I feel this tap on my leg. I look up over my book and down, and there is Christian, standing in front of me with a very grave, serious look on his face (my nephews have inherited their father’s talent for grave, serious looks) and I think “Uh oh, now what?” He says nothing and just stares at me expectantly. Then I notice. The sweater sleeves are untied. They came loose, and the suave look he is obviously pleased about cultivating is gone. I retie the sleeves. A huge grin rewards my efforts immediately. I think I’m getting the hang of this uncle thing.

Now throughout all of this I must confess, my nephew is mostly silent. Except for the odd “Yah”, he communicates mostly with his eyes, and hand movements. He does, when he chooses to, talk a lot, however, he still at this stage of his development, sees no great and lasting use for consonants in his sentences. Noticeably, most of his utterances therefore, are decidedly vowellesque in tone and quality. It can sometimes be an outraged shriek, or sometimes it can achieve the lovely syntax of whalesong. Therefore, when he speaks, something that may sound like “Ooooooaaaaaaaoooowwwwweeeeeeeeeooooo, OH!” is (thanks to his sister again) roughly translated into “I would like the blue freezie if you please uncle dear, NOT the white one, you befuddled old fart.”

At one point, I take it upon myself to teach him to say the word “dude”. So I repeat it over and over again, and he yells out “DOOOOOp!!”
“DOOOO-Duh.” I offer again helpfully.
“DOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! DUH!”
Close enough.

I urge him to tell his Mom. “AAAA!!!” he hollers. “Yes, buddy?” my sister in law smiles at him, “DOOOOOOOO. DUH!” I must remember to get him to do that for his father. After breakfast, we then go out on the swings and sandbox to play, and I had forgotten how simply enjoyable it is to sit on a swing and, well, swing. I push Christian on his swing, and then stand in front of him and pretend to grab at his little feet. He giggles uncontrollably, sometimes shrieking with laughter. He is so much the image of his father at that age that it takes my breath away. I understand for the first time how much fun my parents must have had with us when we were small. They always spoke of it, but I never fully appreciated it until now, with this virtual clone of my brother lighting up in front of me. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much this weekend, but I had a good time, with just little things, watching my niece hide her brother’s cars in the sand, and then telling him to turn around and watching him shriek when he realized what she’d done, and hearing her laugh. Watching her play in her sandbox with the same intense purpose her father had at that age. Watching a two year old yell “BIRBIES!” at the starlings and Robins who had landed on the ground by his feet. Little things yes, but priceless, even to a jaded old windbag like me. It was quite fun, and for one who doesn’t get to experience it every day, its something you don’t soon forget.

It made me wonder why its so effortless this joy that children let themselves delight in. How did we, as adults, forget about this sublime ability to just play for playing’s sake? Meaning and competition, and higher stakes, and politics and all the rest of the pointless, laughless folderol somehow wormed their way in, and we got to thinking that THAT was somehow more important than this, the mere essence of joy itself. Simple play. I breathed a sigh of relief as I pushed myself, a 6’2”, 175 lb., 37 year old grown man, on a child’s swing, grateful that I hadn’t completely forgotten the hang of it, just yet.

On Unforeseen Awkwardnesses.....

I was invited for drinks for my birthday the other day (I know, I know, enough already, how much can one person milk out of one birthday? Bear with me.) by a dear friend who happens to be a film acting teacher. He asked if I wanted to audit his class and then we'd go for drinks afterwards. As a former, ex, once-upon-a-time-ago actor, I said, "Sure", not sure of what I would find, as believe me, there is nothing worse than being stuck in a room full of bad actors. Alright, maybe bad opera singers and bad interpretive dancers are worse, but bad acting comes close. Well, the actors were fine, not all good, not all bad, some quite swell in fact, and fortunately, nobody gave a good goddamn about my opinion, so it didn't matter what I thought anyway. But that isn't what this missal was about.

I got to the appointed place at the appointed time, and met up with my friend, and chatted a bit, and sat down politely and watched as the actors came in, some vying for some hidden spotlight, some sitting right down with their scene partner and rehearsing for their scene, and others showing up late.

So I was sitting there in the corner when I looked up at one young actor as he came in. Oh my God. Him. Him, but I can't remember his name because I was drunk and he was drunk and it was maybe five years ago or less and will he recognize me and there's nowhere to hide oh my God this is so mortifying, but wait my hair is longer now, and he may not remember he was pretty drunk, but oh he's got rid of his braces, his teeth ARE rather nice after all, but why do I have this bad feeling about him, and dear God will he recognize me? WELL. You can breathe now. Eventually I did, because if he did recognize me, he didn't let on, and I sat there and watched the rest of the class. Afterwards, I was waiting for my friend, praying we could get out before anyone said anything, or introductions were made (another friend of his, an agent and a very dear man had shown up to watch as well) and it turned out the agent was the young actor's agent as well. And it turned out they were going to join my friend and I for drinks! How delightful!!!

(At this point I wondered if I was going to faint. But then I remembered, I only faint at the sight of livestock being born. But I digress...)

So we went out for drinks, and it was at this point, I was suddenly very grateful to be with two talkative showbiz types, because they mercifully didn't shut up all night. Which was great, because a)they were wonderful raconteurs and b) it meant I wouldn't have to do much more than keep asking questions. The young actor (sitting beside me, perhaps so that he wouldn't have to face me) was quite quiet as well. Funnily enough, it didn't turn out to be as awkward as I thought it would be. There was no awkwardness in fact, it was just never addressed. I might have muttered a few comments about the conversation in the young man's general direction, but never anything to open up the conversational floodgate. What could I have said anyhow? "Hi, you might not remember me, but you had your tongue down my throat in a crowded lesbian bar about five years ago. How's tricks?"

I hardly think so.

Nevertheless, sometimes awkwardness can be avoided, you just have to play it by ear, and hope to God you have some very talkative theatricals around.

Oh, and the young man's acting? First rate. And he was good on camera too.

Cycle Mania(cs!)

Photos by James Huctwith, Esq.





So there we is, James Anok and I, (James is the fabulous looking cycle-y one in black with the snazzy red bike) just after our 39 km ride out to Mississauga and her native woodnotes wild. The expression on my face was probably still one of shock ("MY GAWD but that moon is BRIGHT!!") when our dear genius artiste du monde friend, James Huctwith, very kindly interrupted his sleep and his painting schedule to come down and take pictures of us in the park. All so we could post them on our blogs for the PWA Bike Rally that we're both on. (You don't think I'd be crazy enough to be up at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday cycling for MY health, do you?!?) Yes, its true, yours truly is going to be biking from Toronto to Montreal at the end of July, on the twin provisos that I have raised $2000 in pledges by then (I'm coming for you dahlings!) and don't die in the bike training rides before then. So far so good.

Both the Jameses were looking fab that day I must say (James A. may have the best legs EVER since Cyd Charisse unveiled hers in THE BANDWAGON, but I digress) and I, well, as you can see, I WAS trying. I was wearing proper biking togs underneath my camouflage, because, well, I am TRYING to get into shape, and the universe as we know it isn't really ready for the sight of me in bike shorts. Give me three months of steady exercise and then we'll talk. Nevertheless, I shall have my Bike Rally Blog up and ready soon, and shall be sending it forthwith, with all sorts of details, and I'll be adding tidbits to this weekly to record as a sort of psychotic journal all of my bicycling adventures.....

Rethinking Endearments....

Thanks to the recent success of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and the nearly ignored return to public appeal of Larry McMurtry (who along with his writing partner, Diana Ossana, adapted the screenplay from the shattering Annie Proulx short story) I took down one of his earlier, (and one of my favourite) books to re-read and enjoy all over again, his 1976 bestseller, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. Most people know of the celebrated movie version, and if you haven't read the book, you should, because the two are extremely different in terms of their character layout, and because, well, McMurtry writes so damn well. I can think of few writers in the world today, who haunt the memory with such cinematic imagery of his characters' internal lives.

McMurtry has said that TERMS OF ENDEARMENT is his most European of novels, even though it takes place in Houston and in later parts, Nebraska and Iowa. This is partly because he wrote it while he was in Europe, and partly because he had been reading a great many European writers for several years beforehand. You can see what he means when you find yourself in the lives of these extraordinarily ordinary people, because nothing is plot driven in TERMS, life just happens, and the men and women who inhabit his world have to adjust to it as best they can. Perhaps this is why I've been enamoured of the novel since I was fifteen years old. It feels like life. People do make bad marriages, and take dissatisfactory lovers to compensate their fear of getting older, even if they can't articulate what that fear is. They do get sick and they do die at an unjustly young age, and they don't have any or all of the answers when they do.

If the plot development is sketchy in TERMS, then it is all the more remarkable an achievement because we don't feel stinted or frustrated by its sporadic, whimsical plotline. Nobody particularly DOES anything in TERMS, Aurora may or may not decide on which suitor she will marry, and Emma may or may not leave her philandering lout of a husband. In less capable hands, the indolence of the story might have driven even the most patient reader mad. Nothing really appears to happen externally, and yet, so much happens under the surface. This is because of McMurtry's genius for creating characters that hold the imagination even while doing something as mundane as sitting in a windownook, fluffing pillows. His two main creations, Aurora Greenway, a fifty-ish transplanted Boston widow, and her 22 year old, married daughter, Emma, form the emotional nucleus of the novel.

Aurora is sophisticated yet earthy, demanding yet compassionate, shrewd and disarmingly childlike and at times, childish. She is described as a large woman with stunning auburn hair and an ability to hold everything and everyone enthralled in her orbit, even when she is at her most impossible. Her daughter conversely, is painted in quiet, almost beaten tones, with drab, dull hair and a passive resignation to life.

When I first read the novel, I was fascinated by the over-the-top liveliness of Aurora, and mildly interested in Emma's day-to-day humdrum existence, but not overly so, since it didn't begin to match Aurora's endlessly interesting adventures. As I got older, and read the novel several more times, my interest in Aurora lessened, and I became more and more interested in the dark corners of her daughter's reasonings and doings. She came to haunt my thoughts more and more in the way her mother had when I was younger, but with less colour and more spare emotional leanness and toughness.

As I got older, it became easier to relate to Emma's life than to Aurora's. (How many spoiled, rich, literate ex-pat Boston widows with fabulous hair do you know?) I knew women like Emma, and I knew the existences they lived in the mid-seventies and eighties. I remembered them from my childhood, mothers of my friends, harried at the supermarket, with two or three kids to manage, that weary smile they always managed for you, especially if you were shy, like I was. Emma was a few years older than my mother, but seemed quite her contemporary. She was an ordinary woman, a Mom, a woman I felt I had known intimately all my life. She wasn't my mother, but she was mothers I knew. As I got older and reread her story again and again, her ordinariness fascinated me more and more. To wit; if Aurora was the ripe luscious fruit basket of a Renoir painting, then Emma was the tough Nebraska winter wheat, bowed but unbroken, pummelled and bloodied, but still standing, her haunting green eyes looking life clearly in the eye.

As the novel progresses, it becomes less a story of Aurora's comic whimsey and fussy boredom with life than it becomes a study of her quiet daughter's steeley strength, and internal life of quiet desperation. Emma may lack her mother's more vivid colour and hilarious vitriol, but she is more than a match for the setbacks and disappointments that threaten to engulf her; a disappointing marriage and a series of disquieting love affairs seem to anneal her toughness, but at the same time, clarify her sense of identity. By the end of the novel, Emma is under no illusions about anything in her life, like her mother, she too is able to see everything clearly, her men, her children, her friends and most all, she can see herself for what she is, and what she has become. She is an ordinary woman with ordinary gifts, but with an extraordinary clarity of thought and vision, which may be why she is so endlessly appealing. If Aurora is a sunlike goddess, then Emma is of the earth, an imperfect but clear eyed and intelligent everywoman. As McMurtry says in a foreward he wrote for a new edition of the novel years later, he hopes that "Emma is what women are, at their best." Having fallen for both Mrs.Greenway and her daughter through the years, I cannot but help hope as well that he is right.

Apple Martinis are da Bomb

Photo by James Huctwith, Esq.

Actually, it was fine. I went to work, people brought me presents, Sona made me a kickass Trini sponge cake, (with some mad recipe like 23 eggs in it) and there was enough for everyone. It was a treat, AND they took me out for lunch, and my old boss Nancy from the National Ballet called and wished me Happy Birthday, and then Amanda (our former receptionist) stopped by and dropped off these lovely flowers, red daisies and then (YES, there's STILL MORE) my dear friend Stephanie Nickerson took me out to a fantabulous dinner at Fire on the East Side, where we were served by a very flirty waiter who liked singing kd lang's "Hymns from the 49th Parallel" as he scooted about. Fortunately he was cute, AND could sing, AND he bought us a round of shooters (red things, dunno what, Valerian or Magenta or something) and I had FOUR apple martinis, which may become my poison of choice. Those things are dead nasty, but in a good way. You never notice them
creeping up on you, until the next day when you're gasping for the Advil bottle. My folks gave me some bucks, and so aside from getting caught in the rain with Scotty (he's right, of course, only in movies do people delight in being caught in torrential downpours, real people just look for somebody to smack) it was an altogether delightful birthday. I must do this again next year.....

On Birthdays and the Blonde Venus Herself.....

Ye Gods. Birthday today. 38 years old. Have decided not to panic, but to just have fun. Since there is no alternative to getting older (well, there IS, but it kind of puts the kibosh on any sort of FUN ever again, so negs to THAT) I may as well enjoy it. Weather is grey, and puts me a little off, especially since I evidently was playing in the sandbox in shorts on my third birthday back in 1971. Grampa had put the corn in by then too, according to family lore, and I was in the sandbox. Probably the last time either occurrence ever happened. But the weather may pick up.

Made a curry/sweet potato soup at work today and nobody died. So far. I went to Nadia's for a Goy Passover supper (that is, we didn't have a clue what was going on, and she explained it all, even though I remembered it all from Sunday school classes as a kid) and ate like a pig, and then drew pictures with Nando, Ethan and Matthew, who are 9, and 5 respectively. Beavers and dams were the big pictures of the night, followed by elephants and insects with elephant ears.

Now today I'm swamped with work, soup making, and dinner tonight with Stephanie at the Keg mansion. Mom and Todd sent me e-cards, and Mom gave me $25, (bar hopping here I come!) Scotty, bless his soul and dwindling pocketbook (his dog is a black hole of financial suckage, cute though she is) went out and bought me, (hang onto yer feather boas kids) the MARLENE DIETRICH; THE GLAMOUR COLLECTION. How SWELL is THAT?!?! I sense a movie night coming; the idea of Huctwith sitting agape watching Marlene crooning HOT VOODOO from inside a gorilla suit, wearing the biggest blond Afro with bones sticking out of it, simply BEGGARS the imagination...Marlene in the fro, not James, although he may very well get into the spirit of the thing too and end up with one.....

Plus there's MOROCCO, which I've never seen, and always wanted to, (its the only movie she was ever nominated for an Oscar for, back in 1930) and a bunch of others....

So far so good birthday. I may step out for some air. I think I overcurried the soup. I'm starting to look a veritably blushing shade of interuterine pink!!!

This First That for ThisnThat

Ye Gods. Birthday tomorrow. 38 and what have I done with my life?!? I'm not panicking. Not really. I usually reserve existential anxiety attacks for major holidays, like Pancake Tuesday and National Oboe Day. Oh, the hell with it. I don't even like the Oboe.